


Reach

by slamncram



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Casual Relationship, Future Character Death, Last Goodbye, M/M, Season/Series 03 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:42:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24904780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slamncram/pseuds/slamncram
Summary: Becoming an Avatar never came with a promise of things being easy. Even knowing that, Oliver wasn't jaded enough to see this coming. But, maybe, he should have...
Relationships: Oliver Banks/Michael "Mike" Crew
Comments: 6
Kudos: 37





	Reach

**Author's Note:**

> This is several weeks late, but I finally had to bust something featuring these two out after MAG 168. I had fun doing it and I sure hope y'all have fun reading it.

All of this had never been something Oliver Banks enjoyed. He’d gone to serious lengths to try to avoid it, to escape it in some way. Even in the middle of the ocean, in a place no life should have been, the End had found him. It had shown him that, no matter what, it came for everyone, everywhere, whenever it wished.

Eventually, he’d come to terms with that. How could he not? The End wasn’t going anywhere, didn’t plan to leave him alone. He’d become an Avatar, without a real understanding of what that meant.

He’d learned. Over the years, through nights of black veins everywhere he looked. And, over time, he met others. Avatars of the Desolation, Avatars of the Flesh. An Avatar of the Eye had approached him after his first visit to the Magnus Institute, and though he hadn’t _really_ understood it then, something in him had known.

None of them seemed to _dislike_ him. Many of them didn’t seem to really _like_ him either, though, Oliver suspected that Jude Perry didn’t give off the impression of liking _many_ people. Elias Bouchard always seemed vaguely amused by him, though Oliver wondered how much of that was a cover for the other things he had going on in the shadows. So many of the Avatars had their own little schemes going on behind the curtain, but Elias Bouchard, well, whatever he was doing, it was perhaps a longer game than the ones some of the others played.

And then, there was Michael. Crew, not the Avatar of the Distortion. _That_ one didn’t seem to come around often. Oliver had _heard_ of him... it. Only seen him once.

That was just fine, by his reckoning.

But, Michael Crew...

Him, Oliver had liked more than he’d expected, mostly because he been able to decide that he felt amicable towards him right away. Usually, with Avatars, he held off on making judgment. They couldn’t always be easy to read. Avatars of the Vast also tended to be a lot to handle. In their own way. Any interaction Oliver had ever had with Simon Fairchild, for instance, always left him feeling the ghost of what he assumed to be exhaustion.

Mike was different, though. Charming, in a way Oliver hadn’t expected. Personable. Intelligent. Shrewd.

Oliver had liked him. Whenever he’d had the chance, for about a year, he’d met up with Mike for a drink. Or a coffee. Eventually, for tea, at Mike’s place.

The rest was, really, history. Or, history enough for a pair of Fear Avatars.

There was a safety in being in an unofficial relationship with another Avatar. For one, they understood you in a way a normal human, or even another non-Avatar devotee, wouldn’t.

For another, having a Fear entity in your corner did, generally, have a little more security for longevity.

With Mike, Oliver wasn’t watching for the inevitable black veins when his head hit the pillow. He knew, when he started following them in his dreams, or seeing them in his waking times, that they could take him to terrible places. Friends long forgotten, family distant but vaguely remembered in some half-dissolved childhood memory. Sometimes the pain came in knowing he was seeing a mother of three, or a child in a hospital bed, parents asleep at his bedside, all of them wrapped in those unforgiving black veins. It had become his new normal, but it was so far removed from who he was now that it was simple to let these things go, to observe but feel next to nothing.

What he never thought to worry about was those veins leading him to a flat he’d become far too used to. He’d known, of course, that it was possible. What they were, what they _did,_ didn’t make them immune to death. Still, he’d never expected that he’d have to worry about the creeping black veins leading him to Mike,

Even as he’d climbed those steps to the door in his dream, he’d hoped to be wrong. To be going to a different flat. A different door.

Being an Avatar had never been that relenting, though.

The veins had led him right to the door he’d known, and dreaded, that they would. Through it, into the kitchen, to the figure at the counter, fixing a cup of tea.

Oliver had woken up wondering if this meant his patron was trying to tell him something. He could never find fulfillment outside serving the End. In the end, everything else would be gone. It didn’t matter if he’d accepted everything after what had happened at Point Nemo. He had made the mistake of holding on to the ability to form attachments. He was paying for it now.

The veins had woken up with him. Or, rather, he’d woken with them. That wasn’t uncommon, but today he felt something close to nausea at the sight of them as he moved around his own flat, dressing himself. Making himself presentable, though he knew where he was going and what he was going there to do. Death might as well look good when delivering bad news, he supposed.

The veins curled ahead of him as he made his way to the train. They clung to the tunnel walls, flashing outside the windows of the car as Oliver stood and watched, one hand curled around the rod overhead. They slithered up the stone steps and inside the door again like they had in his dream, hovering just outside of his direct line of vision when he knocked on the wood, listening to the sounds of movement inside.

“Hey, this is a surprise.” A smile, bright, welcoming. “Come in.”

Mike looked good. Better, Oliver thought, for the fact that the veins seemed to be taking their time reaching him. When the door had swung open, Oliver had been pointlessly relievedto see that their scraggled ends were curled just past the threshold. They hadn’t attached themselves to Mike. Not yet.

But, eventually, they would. Oliver knew better than to cling to that sort of impossibility.

“You look more somber than usual,” Mike commented, watching Oliver drape his coat over the back of one of his kitchen chairs. He was standing in the middle of the kitchen, arms crossed over his chest, bare foot, looking at ease and curious, but hardly like he suspected the worst. Why would he? “Want tea?”

Oliver smiled. “Do I ever say no?”

Mike laughed, softly, moving over to the kettle to get it started. “Oh, once or twice, I think.” He filled the kettle and looked back, his gaze scrutinizing. He was catching on, the longer Oliver stood there, _not_ carrying the conversation forward himself.

“What’s happened?”

It would be so easy to tell Mike the things he’d seen. Oliver could tell him what he was seeing right now. Mike wouldn’t doubt him, or write him off. The difference between Mike Crew and anyone else Oliver had tried to save before was that Mike understood the truth of the world in a way only few did.

But telling him wouldn’t save him. Oliver knew that. It had never saved anyone he’d tried to protect.

Mike was looking at him closely, now. Those pale eyes were narrowed just slightly, looking up at him, trying to read what was going on behind Oliver’s eyes.

Ten days, and those eyes, Oliver knew, would be looking at nothing. Certainly not at Oliver.

Ten days and Oliver would lose the relationship neither of them had ever named. The one he’d been naive enough to think was safe from the things he saw every day and every night.

When Oliver finally moved, it wasn’t to answer Mike’s question. It was to move in and crowd him back against his counter. To hoist him – all five feet and two inches – onto the counter top and kiss him. Mike forgot any questions he’d had at that point, going blissfully compliant, pulling Oliver closer with hands around his shoulders and ankles hooking around the backs of his legs, kissing him just as fervently until the kettle whistled.

“You can wait for tea,” he murmured, breathless. Despite the veins creeping ever closer, Oliver laughed, pulling away only to move the kettle from the element. The whistle had barely tapered off before Mike was pulling him back in, and Oliver was feeling like he was tipping head over heels, Mike’s mouth on his.

After, they laid on the living room floor, catching their breath. Next to Oliver, Mike was smiling, serene, clearly thoroughly pleased, like the cat that got the cream, one hand curled over his bare stomach.

For his part, Oliver was trying not to think about how this may be the last time he saw that smile, and got to watch Mike bask in his afterglow.

“That what you came for?”

Oliver glanced down, watching the way the veins reached towards Mike’s ankle, itching to curl around it, bury themselves in his skin, and seal his fate for good. Mike couldn’t see them. He wouldn’t feel them. They were for Oliver’s eyes only, slowly stealing the high that had come with a particularly spectacular orgasm.

This was what it was to be an Avatar.

This was what it was to be an Avatar of the End.

“Problem with that?” he answered, finally, swallowing the true answer. This was what he’d come for. To hold Mike and look into his eyes and listen to his laugh when they’d collapsed back on the floor, spent and euphoric. To say goodbye, in a way.

One last time.

Mike laughed, oblivious to the truth hidden behind Oliver’s teeth, rolling over to kiss him again, once more, before he got to his feet.

“Not at all. You still want that tea?”

By the time Oliver left – dressed again, tea drank – the veins had their hold on Mike. Looped around his ankle, creeping under the hem of his pants, the point where they dug into his skin invisible under fabric.

Oliver hadn’t told him. How could he? Mike was an Avatar. They all did what they could to feed their patrons, to find the way for their power to reign supreme.

Was that not, by definition, signing a death sentence for themselves?

No matter how much Oliver tried to remind himself of that, it didn’t make the vague ache in his chest hurt any less. The dangers of attachment were never clearer to him than when things like this happened – when it was someone he knew.

As he walked away from Mike’s flat, lips still warm from the kiss Mike had stolen on his way out the door, he suspected that it hadn’t hurt quite this much since his father. Perhaps, one day, that sort of thing wouldn’t happen any more.

Until he learned not to make attachments to anyone, though, he doubted it.

Oliver was waiting for the train again when he felt a hand on his arm.

Next to him stood a woman with a knowing look in her eye. She was dressed in an oversized hoodie, under a trenchcoat, leggings disappearing into black boots. There was a pattern of scars across her scalp, dancing over her dark brown skin, reminiscent of a spider web.

Annabelle Cane.

“Something’s coming for him,” she said, simply. “The Watcher’s working on something. I suspect it might be the sort of thing you might be able to help with.” She paused. “Have lunch with me?”

Oliver sighed.

Mike was marked for death. His closest relationship since becoming an Avatar, and he would be gone within the next ten days. Oliver wasn’t the only one who knew it, not if the Mother of Spiders was standing here, waiting on his answer. The world was changing, and as an Avatar of the End, it was his duty to hold together and change with it.

What did he have to lose, now?

“Sure.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> If you'd like to come yell at/with me about The Magnus Archives and other nonsense, you can find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/slamncram)!


End file.
